Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!allosaur.cis.ohio-state.edu!bob From: bob@allosaur.cis.ohio-state.edu (Bob Sutterfield) Newsgroups: comp.sys.next Subject: Re: NeXT alternatives Message-ID: Date: 30 Mar 89 17:40:12 GMT References: <12192@reed.UUCP> <245300010@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> <688@garcon.cso.uiuc.edu> Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Organization: The Ohio State University Dept of Computer & Information Science Lines: 29 In-reply-to: dorner@pequod.cso.uiuc.edu's message of 30 Mar 89 15:54:28 GMT In article <688@garcon.cso.uiuc.edu> dorner@pequod.cso.uiuc.edu (Steve Dorner) writes: In article <245300010@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> mcdonald@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu writes: Don't you mean an existing OS? It should port easily to a Sun3 or a Mac II raw hardware. NeXT has had their own hardware since last fall. They've been developing software for a lot longer than that. I think that makes it quite clear just how portable the software must be. It all started on Sun-3s, and only migrated to the wire-wrap NeXT boards early last summer. And most of the software people had Sun-3s on their desks through July, until Manufacturing was able to provide enough cubes to populate the offices. Suns were still the prevalent NFS servers for a very long time, and may still be. next.com (the inbound mail gateway machine, "moat") was until very recently a Sun running NeXT's Mach, and likely still is. It's hard to tell, since relay.cs.net (NS and SOA for next.com) doesn't advertise HINFO records for it. Perhaps that's why Jobs doesn't want to release source: people could make use of the NeXT NiFTIeS without buying so much NeXT hardware. Their existing workstation investment wouldn't be obsolete quite so quickly. As it is now, NeXT machines are islands unto themselves, almost the classical personal computer, only incidentally interacting with the rest of the machines around them. If NeXT's user-level software could be run on other machines, there wouldn't be so much incentive to buy NeXT hardware. But I digress...